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Organic Pepper Production: Soil Preparation to Harvest, organic farming is the best method for all crops

hi I'm Qasim Abbas Dogar 
one of the farm production managers here at the UCSC farm at the center for agriculture and sustainable food system,
today we're going to talk about transplanting peppers,
I'm going to show you some techniques
and talk about why we do what we do so '
what I'd like to cover first is just a quick review of what we do to the field to get pepper beds ready to transplant,

so we would start with a cover crop in the winter, once the rains have kind of stopped around March or April and the soil is dried down to a workable moisture will mow that cover crop we'll go ahead and incorporate the material with our Spader so all the organic matter gets tucked into the field we would than wait ten to fourteen days for that material to break down afterwards we'd come back through and lift up our beds to make the peaked mounds,

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after this step there's a relly important step that we always like to highlight here at the farm which is pre irrigating those listed mounds what that looks like is putting out our raised aluminum pipe our overhead sprinklers onto our listed beds we put down about an inch o an inch and a half of water we  wait again ten to fourteen days what that does is establishes good moisture within the peaked mounds and it also given us a flush of needs that will subsequently come back through and kill as a weed flush it has two main purposes for the bed preparation which is one establish good moisture in the soil profile and to germinate  of weeds that will kill before we even plant the crops so that we're essentially doing weeding before the plant are even in the ground ,

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the last step once we have the peak mounds that have been that I've had that we'd flush is to actually come back through and shape the beds and that's where we bring a steel essentially a steel pan over the lifted beds it just flattens out the surface so that you end up with what you see here which is a pretty nice flatbed surface, with the soil just slightly compacted and tucked so that there's good soil contact, so that the moisture can move evenly around the beds ,

so before we actually transplant our crops into bed and I show you our technique what I want to go over briefly is some of the key ideas around transplanting,
and what you're looking for an ideal situation so the first thing I want to cover is moisture in the bed as I had said earlier we pre irrigate our beds so that there's plenty of moisture in the profile and what that will look like is,
if I dig my trowel into this bed and pull it up slowly you can see that there's dry soil on the surface where some of it is dried down but deeper into the bed there's really nice moisture,
that these transplants are going to get planted right into
so ideal moisture is one of our key conditions for ideal transplanting the other thing is the kind of environmental conditions,
so right now it's pretty sunny but it's still early in the morning ideally I would call in an overcast day but I don't quite have that power yet so we'll deal with it as we can at least it's in the morning so the sun isn't all the way the peak ideally, 

you want to be transplanting in the morning or in the late afternoon but definitely not at midday the other thing is that there's no wind right now which is nice again when we'll increase evaporation and stress on the transplants as they get in the ground so no wind again early in the morning or late in the afternoon and ideally  some sun cover but of course you have to do deal with what you have ,
so those are environmental conditions there are also the soil moisture conditions and then let's look actually at the transplants themselves,
so here we're actually going to plant transplanting from two-inch pots today sometimes growers will prick out their peppers into two-inch pots sometimes into the seedling trays which you may have seen earlier in the videos but I'll demonstrate with the inch pots today,
so what we're looking at here is a nice strong transplant when we actually look at the transplant itself coming out of the pot this is really ideally what we want to see and what that is that you can see these kinds of nice white roots at the edges of the pot so this transplant has been growing out but it's not quite root round in the pot itself so this is perfect stage at which to put the transplant in the ground 
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